"From the time I was growing up, if I felt that there was some pot of gold waiting for me, I don't know that I would've been so motivated. I’m doing fine on my own. I don’t need any."

Vanderbilt, 90, the great-great-great-granddaughter of the railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, is said to be worth $200 million after amassing a fortune as a jeans designer and from her perfume company.

Cooper declined to tell Stern whether he was a multimillionaire himself, but the Daily Mail reported that he earns $11 million a year from CNN, lives in a converted firehouse in New York City's Greenwich Village, and has two neighboring homes in the Hamptons.

He told Stern that his older brother Carter committed suicide in front of his mother by jumping off a window ledge while Anderson Cooper was away at Yale.

The newsman also revealed he’s been with his partner, bar owner Ben Maisani, for five years, and said that if he became a father one day, he'd likely follow in his mother’s footsteps.

"I would want them to start working early on and start to have a sense of responsibility," he said. "If maybe I felt like they had a good sense of responsibility, maybe I would try to leave some money. I don't know."